


The First and the Last, the Beginning and the End

by tomato_greens



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Implied Underage, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-09-26
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles never pictured himself as the big bad wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First and the Last, the Beginning and the End

**Author's Note:**

> Everything is Teen Wolf and nothing hurts.

They bury Stiles’s mother in the woods next to his maternal grandmother––a peaceful thing, his father silent in loss, throwing harebell and bleeding heart on her freshly dug grave. 

“God bless,” says Grandpa Adamczyk, who left the wild reaches of Poland to give his human wife and daughter a better chance and who has buried both of them in new-made soil. His accent is so heavy that Stiles can rarely understand him in either of the languages they share. “Amen.”

“Amen,” chokes Auntie Nadya, his father’s sister, one hand on his father’s shoulder and one on Stiles’s head. She pulls on his hair with her sharp red nails, and Stiles, who was born a wolf, howls his grief.

-

It was never the great tragedies that cut away at their Pack, evil Hunters or vicious Omegas or rogue Alphas, the horrors Packs weave their bonfire stories from, but the smallest, most painful tragedies: an interstate pileup, the car’s spine nearly twisted in two––the insidious seep of carbon monoxide in a hotel, leaving thirty-six dead––every bitterly ugly stage of cancer.

Stiles is the only one left.

-

“You’re trespassing,” says Stiles mildly. The two boys in front of him––gangly, wretched, obviously terrified––freeze, the slighter one stumbling over his excuses, an apology. Stiles hands him his inhaler. 

“Thanks?” says the kid.

“I live but to serve,” Stiles says, baring his teeth in his very best grin. 

One of them looks over his shoulder, blue eyes wide. Stiles gives him a little wave.

-

The house is in disrepair, obviously, since Stiles hasn’t stepped foot in it for a decade. The last memory he has is there is of his grandfather laid out on the old brass bed stand, offering Stiles his weakening neck, like a sacrifice, or a throne. 

Stiles doesn’t remember much else of what happened that night, but he does know he––couldn’t––that he kissed his mother’s father on the forehead and then left him to die. 

-

Stiles has secreted himself comfortably in the woods around Beacon Hills when he hears an oddly familiar snarl and whips around to see two red eyes disappear into the trees.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Stiles swears when the kid––Scott––turns up bit, “I thought I was done with this shit.”

“Hey!” Scott says, indignant and clutching at his side, where the blood from the Hunters’ arrow is seeping through his ugly-ass shirt. Derek, the other kid, remains silent and solemn on the other side of the clearing, obviously trying for stoic but ending up somewhere around constipated. Stiles has no idea whether they had the brains to ask him for help or just stumbled across him mid-lurk, but going by Scott’s aura of general cluelessness he’s going to take the latter for three hundred, Alex.

“Calm down,” Stiles sighs, “let’s see what we can do.”

-

Scott is earnest and well-meaning and sweet as a goddamn kitten, which are pretty good qualities to have in someone who has been nonconsensually mutated for a dashing lycanthropic lifestyle, but he can be dimmer than a burnt-out filament, and having Derek McBrooderson as his best friend doesn’t exactly lend him any emotional stability.

“I talked him through wolfing out during lacrosse practice,” Derek says, gaze fixed firmly on the air beside Stiles’s head. “He almost killed me, though.”

Scott groans. “I didn’t mean to!” he protests.

“Oh my god, what even _are_ you people?” Stiles can’t help himself from asking. “I don’t want to be hanging around a damn high school all day, it’ll give me hives, not to mention I’d rather avoid the Sex Offender Registry for as long as possible.”

Derek’s eyes go squinty with anger and his truly spectacular eyebrows furrow. “You’re the one who even made this happen,” he points out.

“Uh, untrue,” Stiles says, waving a finger in the air. “We’ve been over this. I didn’t bite Scott.”

“Yeah, but someone did, and we’re not even out looking for him!” Derek raves. 

Stiles has to admit that this is true, but on the other hand––“I haven’t sensed an Alpha anywhere, and believe me, I was looking. And no one else has turned, or been killed. It just doesn’t seem like he’s out there.”

“Alpha?” Scott asks, looking pained.

Stiles pulls out his childhood copy of _Julie of the Wolves_ and hands it to him. “Go on,” he says. “You might even learn something.”

-

“I’m old for my age,” Derek says, sulkily.

“You really aren’t,” Stiles sighs.

-

Allison Argent is cute as a button and has a mean hand with a crossbow and is about a thousand times brighter than Scott, although the depth of their _teen lurve_ is kind of vomit-inducing. Stiles, who never claimed to be perfect, has to remind himself weekly that the fact that her family is a bunch of racist killers isn’t really her fault, although sometimes he doubts her commitment to sparkle motion.

-

Stiles doesn’t actually know what happens when an Alpha dies of natural causes, or where all that power goes. He knows his grandfather killed his own father on some distant deathbed, a mercy stroke––it’s one of the reasons the Hunters hate wolves. 

They say Hunters never kill their own. Stiles would beg to differ, if he could be bothered enough to try.

-

(Allison doesn’t know this, but she has a third cousin once removed, Kate, who used to have Stiles wrapped around her little finger. Wolves heal fast, but there are some things that go too deep. He still has the scars to show for it.)

-

Chris Argent tracks him down in the hardware store, where Stiles is looking very intently hinges.

“Hi,” he says, before Argent can do the spooky Hunter lurchalong into his peripheral vision. “Do you think it’ll make the bathroom door less squeaky if I just replace the hinge, or is squeakiness some kind of integral door quality?”

Argent remains silent, eyebrows raised.

“WD-40 doesn’t seem to be doing the trick,” he explains, and reaches out for the $4.99 bi-fold.

Argent shakes his head and hands him the $11.50 pack of two. “These are better quality,” he says. “And satin nickel has a––less abrasive look than chrome.”

“I wouldn’t want it to be too aggressive,” Stiles agrees, and goes to stand in line.

-

He sees the back of his father’s head disappearing around a tree while walking over to Scott’s house one day.

“Dad?” he calls, heart racing, but there isn’t anyone there.

-

“Erica Reyes is missing,” says Derek. 

“Oh my god, what the hell are you even doing here?” Stiles shrieks, flailing up from his nap on the couch. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

Derek shrugs. “Scott’s busy with Allison and I have study hall,” he says.

“That’s an extremely flimsy excuse,” Stiles says. “You know you have to go to class––”

“And eat my vegetables so I can grow up strong and become the astronaut President of the United States,” says Derek. It’s probably the longest sentence Stiles has ever heard him utter in the six weeks since Scott got turned. “Erica Reyes is missing. Are you coming or not?”

“Obviously,” Stiles scoffs.

-

The woods are quiet and calm like they usually are. Stiles has seen Pack wars before, and wolves gone wrong––this isn’t like that.

“She’s not here,” he tells Derek, who seems frustrated. “Look, she’s just not here.”

-

They don’t find her; she comes back to school two days after the full moon looking like she’s going to vibrate out of her skin, and Scott brings her to Stiles.

“I could smell it on her,” he explains, handing her over.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Erica says, her eyes closed, her arms crossed tightly over her body. She has a scab on her chin. “Just please don’t hurt me.”

Stiles lets her go to put her at ease, but she just stands there, shivering with nerves, readying herself for an attack. He can smell the fear on her, the preemptive humiliation, and he remembers one of the things his mother told him just before she died–– _You’re a predator, baby, but you know you don’t have to prey on people smaller than you. Not everybody got that lesson._

“Erica,” Stiles says, considering, “what if I told you you didn’t have to be afraid anymore?”

She shakes her head and lets out a cynical bark of laughter. “Yeah, sure. I’ve heard that one before.”

“Hey,” says Derek, making himself smaller somehow. “Hey, look.”

“Derek Hale?” Erica asks, squinting at him. “What are you doing here?”

Derek clears his throat and puts a hand out to stop Scott from butting in. “We’re just here to help you,” he says, and, hesitatingly, “you don’t have to put up with petty bullshit anymore. No one’s going to touch you or anything unless you tell us it’s okay. But it is really important that you listen to us, because if you don’t, you might hurt yourself or––or someone else.”

Erica doesn’t look less skeptical, but she does uncross her arms.

-

Somehow, Stiles seems to be collecting himself a Pack without ever being an Alpha first.

He wishes his grandfather were around. 

-

For all that Derek scowls 24/7 and is basically the moodiest seventeen-year-old on the planet now that Scott’s got superpowers and a girlfriend, it turns out that he’s not terrible company. They spend a lot of time together while Erica and Scott try to figure out control, something to anchor their human selves on––Scott’s progressing a lot faster than Erica, but then, Stiles thinks, Scott has Allison. Stiles isn’t sure Erica has ever had anyone.

“You should take up sports or something, so you can work out all of that anger,” Stiles suggests one evening after what he’s started calling The Baby Werewolf Variety Hour. “Lacrosse, maybe.”

Derek snorts. “Tread softly and carry a big stick? No thanks. Jackson Whittemore doesn’t need to beat anyone else up in a school-sanctioned environment.”

“Jackson? Seriously?” Stiles asks, wrinkling his nose, and cups the back of Derek. He’s heard the name before, from all three of his wolves, and it’s never been nice. “He sounds like a douche bag who drives a Porsche and shits money and whose opinions of people are totally worthless.”

Derek shrugs him off, but one corner of his mouth is tilted up.

-

Stiles is totally a fearsome creature of the night, okay. He is not about to bare his neck from some random seventeen-year-old’s devastating smile.

-

Goddammit.

-

Seventeen, Stiles reminds himself, and turns the _suppression_ dial up to eleven.

-

Allison and Scott break up, and then get back together, and then break up, and then get back together.

“She’s having some family problems,” Scott says, and Stiles feels his hackles rise.

“Are these the kinds of family problems I should be aware of?” he asks.

Scott shrugs, helpless.

-

“I mean it, are you there––Dad?” Stiles says to the trees. No one answers.

“Kate?” he tries. A twig snaps. Then, silence.

-

Over the next two months, two more students go missing and turn up wolficized. Stiles does his best to balance a Pack (a Pack, he can’t help but think, that isn’t even _his_ ), but control is a thing learnt best through practice, and he’s only got so much time to supervise playtime when he’s trying to figure out who the hell is turning all these angsty teenagers into killing machines, because seriously, it’s not a good plan.

“No, Isaac, that’s _bad touching!_ ” Stiles yells, exasperated, and runs in between them all, pulling out the claws.

-

“I guess I just don’t understand how you’re doing this,” Derek says that night. Stiles realizes he doesn’t know anything about Derek’s family, or why he doesn’t like going home, or why his parents don’t seem to worry as much as they probably should about the fact that their teenaged son is probably writing free verse poetry about the pain in his soul and hanging out with a wolf who tends to stripes and plaid. “Isn’t it too––I don’t know––like, fun? They look like man-eating puppies.”

“Think of it like Werewolf Montessori,” Stiles says, and there it is again: Derek’s smile.

-

Stiles remembers Kate Argent, of course, although he tries to block out as much as possible––she used his heart all up and then showed him pictures of his father, dead of a heart attack at fifty-nine, before forcing him at wolfsbane-dipped gunpoint to bite her.

-

(Last he knew she was somewhere in Texas, but what’s a few thousand miles to a wolf displaced?)

-

Derek’s been crying but Stiles knows better than to ask him what it was about.

“You okay?” he says instead.

“Sure,” Derek says. “I’m always okay.”

-

Stiles answers the door at four in the morning to Allison looking distraught. He automatically locks into Scott, but Scott’s safe at home, asleep, after––oh god, after jerking off, _werewolf senses are the worst._ “Allison? What’s up? Are you okay?” 

She stays a paralyzed silent for a few seconds, and Stiles realizes with a lurch of his stomach that her cheeks are tear-stained. “It’s my mom,” she says. “I found something.”

-

“Fuck,” says Stiles.

“Pretty much,” says Allison. Her face is hard. “I brought my bow.”

“I think I know who it is,” Stiles says. “Okay. Come on.”

-

When Stiles comes a-calling, Derek is swaddled in his giant ratty Nine Inch Nails sweatshirt. Stiles wishes he did not know that he has an even rattier My Chemical Romance one in his closet.

“Put some real clothes on,” he says, and while Derek is still spluttering, “we’ve got an Alpha to catch.”

“Isn’t Scott supposed to be Robin in this kind of situation?” Derek asks.

“Sure,” says Stiles. “We’ll be swinging by his house too. I’m just calling in Wonder Woman for backup.”

“I hate you so much,” Derek says.

-

“It’s not their fight,” Allison says.

“We’re Pack,” says Erica, crossing her arms in something like solidarity. “It’s all our fights.”

Allison hunches up. “Fine,” she tells Stiles, “but they should stay out of range unless we really need them.”

-

The only reason they find her at all is that Chris Argent tells them where to go.

“I can’t betray my wife,” he says, his face a mask, “but I don’t think she is who she was, anymore.”

-

They find Victoria Argent not far from the Stilinskis' ancestral home, a rifle in one hand and a leash in the other. She has two other young women behind her––clearly relatives of Allison’s, the resemblance unmistakable.

“Mom?” Allison says faintly.

“Dad,” Stiles says, overwhelmed and disbelieving. “Dad?”

“Stay back,” says Argent. “You reek of Pack, submission––you’re no daughter of mine.”

“Mom,” says Allison, reaching out.

Argent lifts the gun into place, lets loose the wolf.

-

The fight can’t last more than fifteen minutes, but it seems like it takes hours. Stiles remembers it in snapshots.

-

The Argents fight dirty, which is a surprise to no one. Scott gets a wolfsbane bullet to the knee, another to the gut, but takes a swipe at Argent’s wolf, catches him from neck to navel.

-

Stiles bites the throat out of one of the girls just as she plunges a knife into his hip.

-

“You’d be amazed at the filth you can find with a howl when it’s left lost and roaming,” Argent says, sneering, pushing past Stiles to get at Allison.

-

Derek is lighting wolfsbane on fire at the edge of the clearing around the house––Stiles can see him pack some into Scott’s wounds.

-

Allison’s mother is finally still, with one of Allison’s arrows sticking out of her eye.

-

In the last minutes while everyone else has fallen, dead or unhealed or grieving, Stiles looks his father in the eye and says, “I love you. More than anything, I love you.”

His father’s eyes glimmer down to their usual hazel. “Stiles?” he says, confused. “Where’s your mother? I had––I had a terrible dream.”

“Go back to sleep, Dad,” says Stiles, and, tenderly, helps him go.

-

Allison and Scott are off again.

-

They bury his father next to his mother the very first evening of the new year––the ground is as frozen as it gets, and there isn’t any harebell or bleeding heart to be found, but Derek magics up a snapdragon from somewhere and hands it to him.

“I know what it’s like to lose someone,” he says, and Stiles thinks of the picture he’s seen in Derek’s room dozens of times now, of Derek and his parents and his older sister Laura, who Stiles will never meet.

“Yeah,” says Stiles, and covers his face with his hands.

-

Allison and Scott are back on. Stiles can’t keep up with the emotional whiplash.

-

“What big teeth you have,” Derek says, hands in his pockets.

“The better to eat you up with, my dear,” Stiles says. 

Derek reaches for him.


End file.
